Solar System as it really is and Curating as/in Common/s

Abstract

In this proposition of curating in/as common/s I am interested in a particular relation between curating and commons. I claim that there is a link between curating and ‘commoning’, that is the activity and process that produces the commons, and that this link is based in practice. It lays in the fact that the two employ forms of organisation, a particular kind of arrangement of social and aesthetic relations, space, time, forms of behaviour, customs, and ways in which these are governed and controlled, in other words the way in which they are held in common. When we say that something is curated the understanding is that we are dealing with a collection assembled and displayed accord- ing to a curatorial vision and under curator’s direction. Regardless if we are dealing with an übercurator with total control over exhibition, or if the curator’s role is instrumental in delivering the museum’s mission, or if indeed collaborative forms of curating or co-curating are engaged in process of curatorial production, a curator can be considered an apparatus of power, a dispositif in a Foucauldian sense. A different form of organisation is in- voked, however, when we refer to commons which are understood as a self-organised community shaping, managing and utilising resources through ‘community control’.